Graph drawing for the web

» Archive for January, 2009

Haven’t posted anything lately so I wanted to catch everyone up on my progress. For the past few weeks I have been implementing a kind of shelf system to store custom shapes. That is more or less done. What’s holding up the update right now are some small bugs, UI enhancements, and performance upgrades.

One of the things I want when the shelves system is done, is to release many different object that could be used in several different chart drawing projects. However when creating them I ran into a few bugs and performance issues. These are being sorted out right now.

In addition to those, I also began to clean up the UI elements. Some of the buttons did not look correct and consistent, so I am changing those as I go. I also shrunk the Graphsy logo to give more drawing room to the user.

I’m hoping to get all of the features done in about a week, so if everything goes right you should see a new and improved Graphsy version after that.

After this upcoming release, I will spend some time updating the videos, front page, blog, and the help system of Graphsy. In the mean time feel free to request new features or report bugs.

I have been debating this with myself for quite some time now. On one hand, it seems that writing code, or at least understanding enough about code to edit it, is quickly becoming a skill most people will find helpful to have. Something like knowing how to put together IKEA furniture, not completely necessary to do, but helpful if you know how. On the other hand, however, developers are doing a good job creating tools that abstract the code via some visualization. At the end of the day, these tools still produce code, but the user never has to see it.